№ 2
Barry Guy New Orchestra
Oort-Entropy
—Liner Notes (Intakt 101)
In late 2004, Barry asked me to write the notes to his New Orchestra’s second Intakt recording, Oort-Entropy. It’s a magnificent cast: Barry, Agustí Fernández, Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Hans Koch, Johannes Bauer, Herb Robertson, Per Åke Holmlander, Paul Lytton, and Raymond Strid.
Architecture has always been an inexhaustible point of reference for sorting out Barry Guy’s music. It’s a natural place to start, especially if you’re staring into the sprawling story of his London Jazz Composers Orchestra, the seminal group which was put on hold in 1998 after nearly 30 years together. Guy, remember, once worked in an architect’s office, and he often describes the physical act of composing as a draftsman might. Certainly the LJCO’s eight albums, from Ode (1972) to Double Trouble Two (1995), with their vaulting structures and vast passageways of line and color, suggest a particular kind of permanence, built, as they are, on foundations that flash between things set down in ink and those engineered on the spot.
Yet the Barry Guy New Orchestra, his more compact and equally ambitious ensemble formed five years ago, seems to ask of us something different. Architectural metaphors still work. Here, however, a great series of dialectical strings give this project a wonderful new energy, and a fresh set of figurative possibilities. The ongoing pull between predetermined and improvised material continues, as it has for much of Guy’s career. But now the thematic pairs have a practically irresistible pull; a sense of tension and release acts as kind of shifting and natural force of gravity — the tug between order and clutter, tenderness and brute strength, lyricism and discord. Often, extramusical motives come to mind. Movies. Paintings. Visual art that swirls inside, where the overarching narrative is embodied by complex combinations of color, thought and emotion. A rough guide? Think of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, Martin Scorsese or David Mamet, each a master of design, no matter how oblique or fraught with angles and rapid-fire expression.
However you might imagine this project, the BGNO is operating in a world well beyond its more prosaic roots: the impossible economics of its predecessor. After the LJCO’s last concert, Intakt’s Patrik Landolt suggested something more manageable — 10 musicians, perhaps, instead of 17. Guy soon realized he had a readymade within the many strands of his musical life: the set of interconnected chamber groups he’d been working with for years. This wouldn’t be some makeshift meeting between LJCO events.
Jump to Oort-Entropy where you’ll find this aesthetic landscape two steps further along from the group’s 2001 debut, Inscape-Tableaux. Guy’s trademark orchestral methods are here — shrill, tutti walls, streams of circular activity, grave dramatic gestures buried in plush reeds and brass — woven into handfuls of instant configurations. The voices, the organization and the compositions themselves all hold a huge mirror to an already uncovered aspect of Guy’s musical mind: his chamber life. Trios in particular act as a kind of central axis — the saxophone groups, with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton, and with Mats Gustafsson and Raymond Strid, and the piano trio with Lytton and Marilyn Crispell.
Indeed, Oort-Entropy is in many ways a homage to Crispell. The American pianist recently put a cap on traveling, dropping out of the BGNO in 2004. But she left recommending the Spaniard, Agustí Fernández, a natural for her chair, someone whose approach neatly follows a line of pianists Guy admires — Crispell, Irène Schweizer, Alexander von Schlippenbach — musicians who might tear through a large ensemble and still end up quite happily alone center stage.
But Fernández’s presence doesn’t diminish Crispell’s enormous impression on this new album. Early on Guy built a bridge between the BGNO’s repertoire and the trio’s two discs, Ithaca (2004) and Odyssey (2002), hitting on a tone that works in miniature — the discs are, to my mind, high-water marks in recent trio music — and lifts beautifully onto a larger canvas. “Odyssey,” the title-piece, was woven into Inscape, while three compositions from Ithaca appear on Oort. “Zig Zag” briefly passes near the end of Part III, a slow, wailing collective stream, while “Third Shard” acts as a coda to Part II, with Gustafsson (on baritone sax) making Crispell’s ethereal effects his own, floating in and over Guy’s arco haze.
But at the heart of Oort-Entropy — the second part, the spine, I would suggest — lies “Void (for Doris),” a clear, haunting line borne by a ringing pedal tone, somber backgrounds and the lovely melancholy of Per Åke Holmlander’s tuba. What began in trio becomes a microcosm for Guy’s 10-piece vision.
Here, “Void” emerges out of a gorgeous Parker-Guy preface, before spilling into another duo improv, this time between Holmlander and trumpeter Herb Robertson. Others join as the Swedish trio emerges, Gustafsson, Guy and drummer Raymond Strid ripping into a terrific outpouring of energy, Robertson still flying about on top. A short collective segue alludes to the melody, leaving Fernández alone as he drafts his own solitary answer to the line.
Many of Oort’s combinations actually find their roots in the group’s first performances in Dublin in 2000. Ever since, Guy has created complex, spaghetti-like diagrams, lists in which he connects the dots: who’s played with whom? what works? what doesn’t? While they may only meet up three or four times a year Guy carries all these little aural scenarios around in his head. He might envision a single voice against a construct, a particular wash of sound or a clear, sharply defined gesture.
Guy isn’t a big cinema buff, but he once admitted to me a fascination with a director’s methods. “It’s always interesting the way films have the ability to show the bigger vista,” he said early on in the BGNO’s life. “Then they pan and focus on one specific detail: it could be an eye, or it could be a hand or it could be a small gesture.” Here, he’s exploring how he might focus sound, channeling everyone into a particular way of listening, clearing away pockets for a single voice (Fernández throughout) or two (the prefaces, where he joins Hans Koch, Parker and Gustafsson) or an assortment of larger units.
On Oort-Entropy events are planned in ways not unfamiliar to an actor setting up an improvisation. Scores and spontaneous creations live seamlessly side by side. Short vignettes are played out, breakaway ideas appear, individuals interrupt and collective visions turn into something entirely new. In the Barry Guy New Orchestra an archipelago of combos are plotted in advance and transformed into a brilliant kind of democratic art. The final results are here for all to see: something profound, something lasting, a shimmering musical imprint created by 10 superior voices.